Joely Richardson, the actress, has spoken of how she has finally begun to
emerge from the grief caused by the death of her sister, Natasha.

Richardson said that after more than four years she was able to “start embracing joy”, having spent the time since Natasha died in a skiing accident in March 2009 trying to make sense of the tragedy, which she described as “like a giant explosion”.

Natasha, her older sister, suffered a head injury when she fell on the slopes in Quebec, but paramedics did not initially realise the seriousness of the impact, and it was only seven hours later that her injuries became apparent.

She died the next day in New York, where she had been taken by air ambulance. She was 45.

Her death devastated the family, her sister said in an interview with The Telegraph. It also led to the break-up of her relationship.

“Tasha leaving us was just absolutely heartbreaking, and it was heartbreaking over a very long period of time,” she said.

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“When you are close to someone, your whole take on life is very interconnected, however different you are, which we were. The added difficulty was something so intensely private being so public.

“Going into restaurants, an airport, a café — in a way it was a beautiful thing, that people cared about Tash enough to come up to me — but it was a constant onslaught of something I wasn’t ready to accept for a long time. So I became very private and cut myself off.

“The best quote I heard was 'explosions leave big holes’. It’s like a giant explosion and as a result there were many casualties. A lot of my friends changed, my relationship went, everything went, life as I knew it.”

But it was this spring, having spent four years trying to make sense of what at first seemed senseless, that her mood lifted.

“I suddenly realised that enough time had gone by for me to accept that this was the new way of life and to really start embracing joy. It’s too easy to be a victim, and it’s boring,” she laughs, repeating something she’d said to her daughter.

“You know that is so true.” She said that the effect of her sister’s death was to lose a linchpin of the family: “She was very much the one who took control and took care of everyone.”

Her solution to the loss was to repeat a coping strategy of throwing herself into work, which she first did when her husband, Tim Bevan, the co-founder of Working Title and father of her daughter Daisy, 21, left her for another woman 16 years ago.

Back then, Richardson found solace and critical acclaim by returning to the theatre. In 2001, she played the title role, opposite Macaulay Calkin, in an off-Broadway Madame Melville — her first theatre role for 10 years – and the following year in Lady Windermere’s Fan, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London.

In 2009, after her sister’s death, she left her well-paid role in Nip/Tuck, where she had been doing the same thing for six years. And in 2011, she appeared as a bipolar wife in Side Effects, at another off-Broadway theatre.

“It was quite a nutty thing to do, but I’d completely lost my hunger for work. I was tired, done in. I just wanted to go back to the absolute basics of how I started, which was theatre. No outside pressures, no cars, travel, trailers, make-up. Just going back to square one – and that proved my salvation.”

Playing Ellida in Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, at the Rose Theatre, Kingston, London, the following year was part of the same “kamikaze” phase, as both her mother and sister had played the role to great acclaim.

“It was stupid because all the chips were against me, but it became easier to take bigger risks because life wasn’t safe.” It paid off. “I got sent a few very nice cards, and one in particular meant a lot. I don’t know if I can say this in a newspaper …” she said.

“But it was a friend of the family who said, 'Wow that proves you had balls, great big ones!’”

Richardson said that the status of her family – as well as her late sister, her mother is Vanessa Redgrave and her late father is Tony Richardson, the film and stage director – also meant she was aware of the need to stay “grounded”, especially as it meant she was frequently reminded of them.

As well as her immediate family, her acting relatives included her grandfather, Michael Redgrave, who died in 1985, her aunt Lynn Redgrave and uncle Corin Redgrave, who died within a month of each other in 2010, a year after her sister.

“I always felt that in order to tell people’s stories and do my job, it’s important you don’t breath rarefied air, that you stay very, very grounded,” she said. “But it is a weird thing that I can watch many of my relatives who’ve died, alive on the television.”

Richardson is to appear in a new film, Thanks for Sharing, a comedy-drama written and directed by Stuart Blumberg, about sex addicts in a New York self-help group. It stars Mark Ruffalo, Tim Robbins and Gwyneth Paltrow, all of whose characters are in the grip of various addictions.

Richardson said that the subject appealed for its connection with real life. “I’m not an authority on sex addiction, thank God, but from everything I hear, it is something of an epidemic. My job is to tell stories about real people.”

She said she has taken her lead from Patti Smith, 66, the singer and song writer: “I am not a mannequin. I do not exist for the red carpet. It’s not a question of how old you are – it’s all about truth and charisma.”

And while it’s glib to say that she’s moved on, she says she has “not easily, not skippingly” crossed a threshold.

Though Natasha has come with her.

“From someone who never made a list in my life, I am now constantly making lists,” she says.

“The comfort is those relationships stay with you, they are still an influence on your life. And that’s the blessing I’ve found.”

Natasha’s widower, Liam Neeson, her second husband, brings up their two children Micheál and Daniel, in New York. He has said he continues to be “blindsided” by grief.

“That’s the weird thing about grief. You can’t prepare for it,” he said.

“You think you’re going to cry and get it over with … It hits me in the middle of the night. I’m out walking. I’m feeling quite content and it’s like suddenly, boom.”